September 11, 2011

After the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, it became common to proclaim in the press that there aren't actually any average differences between the Nilotic Tutsis and the Bantu Hutus, that Tutsis don't actually tend to be taller than Hutus, that these perceptions are just some sort of mass delusion socially constructed by Belgian colonists.

I can understand why the Tutsi minority that has ruled Rwanda for the last 17 years, and has ruled the Hutu majority in neighboring Burundi for the last half century, wants to propagate a myth intended not only to keep them unchopped up, but also keep them in power undemocratically. But having never felt the urge to chop up a Tutsi, I don't feel much compulsion to believe it, just as I don't feel the compulsion to avoid noticing that most of the people in the news in recent decades in Mexico (e.g., Vicente Fox, Jorge Castaneda, Carlos Slim, or Subcomandante Marcos) don't appear to be terribly Indian by ancestry, even thought the Mexican ruling class made up the La Raza Cosmic ideology/mythology in the 1920s to prevent further race wars.

Razib Khan decided to check out the genetics of this assertion, so he looked for a volunteer for his genetics project. He eventually found somebody who was 3/4th Tutsi and 1/4th Hutu. Sure enough, even with a sample size of N=0.75, he can see that Tutsis show up as different than Bantus.

Still, that raises the question of how in a culture with some degree of intermarriage over the last 500 years, can you still have somewhat distinct Tutsis and Hutus. I think an instructive analog for Rwanda is Mexico. Both were invaded by taller people about 500 years ago. Despite twenty or so generations of intermarriage, taller people still tend to rule there. (E.g., the previous president of Mexico is 6’5″). In my movie review of “Hotel Rwanda,” I explained a likely mechanism for these patterns:

Unfortunately, the screenplay aims at self-absorbed white liberals who think all Africans look alike and that white racism is the root of all evil. The script even claims that it’s merely a white myth that Tutsis tend to be taller than Hutus, asserting that the Belgian imperialists arbitrarily assigned those identities to random Rwandans. Yet, soon the Hutu Power radio station is broadcasting the prearranged code to begin exterminating the Tutsis: “Cut down the tall trees.”

Rwanda’s true history is more instructive. The medium-height Bantu Hutu farmers arrived 2,000 years ago and drove the pygmoid hunter-gatherer Twa into the forests. Then, about the time of Cortez, the tall, slender Tutsi herdsmen invaded from the north and, according to Gary Brecher, the acerbic “War Nerd” columnist, “claimed all the land, on the legal basis that if you objected they’d kill you.”

The Tutsi rulers treated the Hutu peasantry with the same contempt the Norman lords display toward the Saxon yeomen in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. Commenting on Rwanda’s “indigenous racism,” Congo-born sociologist Pierre L. van den Berghe reported that the Tutsis, like other aristocracies, saw themselves as “astute in political intrigue, born to command, refined, courageous, and cruel.”

The Tutsi ascendancy resembled the white pre-eminence in Latin America. Intermarriage was frequent, yet physical differences between the classes endured, just as they have in Mexico, where despite five centuries of intermarrying, the elite remains much taller and fairer than the masses. The trick is that Mexico’s most successful short, dark men often wed tall, blonde women and have more European-looking offspring, thus replenishing the caste system.

Likewise, in “Hotel Rwanda,” Cheadle’s ultra-competent Hutu executive is married to a Tutsi beauty who is taller and fairer than he is. (She’s played by Sophie Okonedo, whose mother is a Jewish Englishwoman.)

I gotta say, that while I have my weaknesses as a movie reviewer, I don't think too many other critics offer novel explanations for major global conundrums in the course of reviewing the Movie of the Week.

You forgot about linkage disequilibrium. Genes will be associated with each other for quite a few generations despite intermarriage. This allows for social assortment according to phenotype that corresponds to distinguishable genotypes i.e. mixed couples who produce children who appear more Tutsi like are generally going to be more Tutsi like in all sorts of genetic ways.

They occupy different niches, the Hutu farming small plots and the Tutsi herding livestock.

So even if there's a good deal of intermarriage, only those offspring whose genes adapt them to the niche they find themselves in -- farming or herding -- will thrive and pass on their genes as well.

That's a neglected point about the cure-all of intermarriage to blur or wipe out differences between groups. People think that once two groups exchange genes, they'll both see a steady rise in diversity over time, closing the genetic and phenotypic gap between them.

Yet if those initial differences were due to natural selection, then intermarriage won't alter much. In the first generation after inter-mixing, there could be the same broad range of variation among the offspring in both groups.

But then in generation 2, only those offspring who resemble the locals will find themselves adapted to their niche.

To make it concrete, imagine a mixed Hutu-Tutsi child who can't digest lactose -- then so much for him if he grows up among the Tutsi, compared to his mixed brother who can drink fresh milk. And suppose he isn't a sickle-cell carrier -- then so much for him if he lives in the lowland tropical farming areas, compared to his mixed brother who is safe against malaria.

Yes.The same people who castigate Belgian colonists for 'favoring he taller and fairer Tutsi' are generally the same people who claim that there are no genetic or phenotypical differences between Tutsi and Hutu.

[Aside] "Unfortunately, the screenplay aims at self-absorbed white liberals who think all Africans look alike and that white racism is the root of all evil."

This observation holds true for this summer's "The Help," which in many respects is quite a good flick. (The directors expect that viewers can follow developments with multiple characters, the action is plausibly plot-driven, and so on.) In its White-Racism/Virtuous-Black-Victimhood narrative, the movie is faithful to the book. In my screening, both whites and blacks liked the show. As with "Hotel Rwanda," it would have been interesting to explore where the two groups' opinions and assumptions diverged.

Some writer from the west wrote a book on Rwanda wherein he claimed the Tutsi-Hutu difference was just a social construct created by the Belgians. Since so very little had been written about this obscure country many people seemed to just accept this claim as being authoritative. I forget the name of the book. The Africans themselves of Rwanda seem not to have written much of anything so the observations of foreigners predominate in any discussion of the place, after first checking the map to see where exactly it happens to be locatedWe get bashed regularly for not having charged in and done something about what happened. The logistics of doing so seems to be an expensive proposition; besides, were we supposed to take sides, keep them apart, what? We'd still be there today

Anon: "What I don't get is WHY the west is supposedly held responsible for the genocide for failing to intervene?"

This principle was established after WWII when America. And other predominantly white, goy countries were held responsible for the slaughter of the Jews by their inaction. As white goyim (nominally Christian) they share in the goy/Christian race guilt for all pogroms. In recent years this collective race guilt has been projected upon all Western goys for non-intervention in any civil war anywhere in the world, but particularly wars in brown/black nations.

What I don't get is WHY the west is supposedly held responsible for the genocide for failing to intervene? I don't see any reason why soldiers from western countries should have to do so.white man's burden and all that, xcept in a twisted PC-form.

ATTA' BOY, STEVE!!!!!!! Pundit, author, genetics journalist, race realist, movie critic, HBD blogger. And you do get your Darwinian Zeitgeist into almost everything you write. Which I enjoy. But it colors my worldview too. And has led me to Steve Pinker, Jon Entine, John Derbyshire, Nicholas Wade, and many more. The Blank Slate is dead. But humanity is more populous and essentially varied as it ever has been. Diversity is Entropy which drives the universe to its ultimate end.

What I don't get is WHY the west is supposedly held responsible for the genocide for failing to intervene?

Good point. Partly, the idea is to talk as much as possible about every genocide in the world --- real or bogus, past or present --- to keep people from noticing the ongoing bloodless genocide in "the West".

So, Hollywood Jews blamed on the African genocide on whites. How typical.

Now, I will admit that Europeans are partly responsible. Though Tutis and Hutu animosity had long existed, European ideology of racial categorization may have made it more conscious and political than merely cultural and habitual. So, the conflict became more collective and 'radical' in nature. (A variation of this among Asian-Indian intellectuals is that the caste system in India had been willy-nilly and weak until Brits came and fully institutionalized it according to British notions of class hierarchy. And supposedly Hindus and Muslims has been living in peace before Brits politicized the divisions. There could be some truth to such assertions though they tend to be greatly exaggerated by lefists. This could be called the White Serpent Theory: Prior to the coming of whites and their Knowledge, non-European peoples had been living in a kind of Eden, or even if there was oppression, it was an innocent kind of oppression--habitual and customary--than consciously evil and intellectual. White serpent made Third Worlders bite into the fruit of CONSCIOUS evil, whereupon Third Worlders lost their innocence. So, the 'innocent' Tutsi domination over Hutus turned into a consciously 'racist' one.)

But, if we wanna accuse the West of exporting 'racism' to the Third World, why not also communism? After all, communism killed 40-50 million in China, 1/4 the population of Cambodia, million in Africa, etc. Couldn't one argue..."for centuries, many classes or castes had been living in relative peace, but the introduction of communism led to class hatred and vengeance, leading to civil wars and crazy policies(like Great Leap Forward) that led to deaths of millions?"But I guess the Western left doesn't wanna take responsibility for that one. Anyway, this too would be a half-truth. Yes, communism and leftist ideology did lead to class hatred and animosity in the Third World, but class divisions were not caused by communism but had long existed.

We can even blame abolitionism for the fratricidal civil war. We can say, "northern whites and southern whites had been more or less one people, but the radical moralism of abolitionists turned them into 'free northerners' and 'slave southerners', and that 'artificial' division led to much bloodbath."

And we can blame the French Revolution and People Power for European violence in the late 18th century and early 19th century. We can say "kings, aristocrats, and peasants had been living in peace, but bourgeois radicals artificially devised and imposed ideas of 'popular justice' and 'nationhood', thereby leading to massive violence and wars between classes and then between 'nations'."

Btw, we can even find source of Hutu genocide in leftism. After all, Hutu violence was a form of slave rebellion. It was less like Nazis killing Poles than Poles exacting vengeance on Nazi Germans. To many Hutus, Tutsis had long been the evil overlords over Hutus. It was not a racial supremacist genocide but racial inferiorist genocide. If Hutus had tolerated Tutsi domination for centuries, it was cuz they 'd been kept ignorant and fearful. But with new freedoms and ideas availed by western imperialism, the Hutu community produced leaders who could lead a 'slave rebellion' or 'anti-racist revolution'. I thought the Left loved slave rebellions. Indeed, they don't much seem to care about all those dying Boers. And funny that the left says 'race is just a myth', but constantly refers to whites as some kind of uniquely evil race responsible for all the misery around the world.

Anyway, don't expect Hollywood to make a movie saying all semitic peoples--Muslims and Jews--had been one, but Jews came up with the 'evil supremacist' ideology of Chosen People, which in recent history morphed into Zionism, which artificially divide Jews from Palestinians.

People who made HOTEL RWANDA faced a conundrum. The good thing was blacks-as-victims. Bad thing was blacks-as-killers. But we all know that blacks are inherently good. So, how could they have committed evil? Because they were taught to hate by inherently evil whites.

One difference between Latin America and Rwanda is that the indigenous people of Latin America mostly adopted the religion and language of their conquerors, whereas the conquering Tutsi adopted the language and religion of the Hutus, so much so that Hutu militias needed to look at the identity cards (which specified ethnic status) of those whom they did not know personally to determine the ethnic status of a detainee (an ID card specifying "Tutsi" was a death sentence).

One difference between Latin America and Rwanda is that the indigenous people of Latin America mostly adopted the religion and language of their conquerors, whereas the conquering Tutsi adopted the language and religion of the Hutus, so much so that Hutu militias needed to look at the identity cards (which specified ethnic status) of those whom they did not know personally to determine the ethnic status of a detainee (an ID card specifying "Tutsi" was a death sentence).

The question of who adopts whose language seems to have to do with which is more prestigious. In Catholic Europe, Germanic elites (Franks, Lombards, Burgundians) adopted the Romance dialects of their subjects because Latin was the language of the Church. This only reversed with the Anglo-Normans after the Great Plague in the 1300s. In the Muslim world, Arabic came to dominate in North Africa and the Fertile Crescent because it was the language of Islam, and likewise in Latin America with Spanish, which was, again, a Latin dialect. In Rwanda, I guess where things were more or less equally presigious, the Hutus were more numerous so their language came to dominate.

You can pretty easily see the appeal of classic imperialism. Guys go out, from say the slums of London or Paris, conquer the heathen, and become big shots. The Sherlock Holmes stories often dealt with the darkside of those exploits (even then entertainment had to appeal to middle class women) such as "Sign of Four."

The new, non-imperialist intervention is driven mostly by women for women's moralizing interests. Exhibit A: "R2P" pushed by Samantha Power and Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton upon Obama with every other National Security person (Gates, Panetta, Petraeus, etc) objecting. The whole idea is that "Nice White Ladies" (writ even larger) will command a bunch of otherwise "icky" military personnel to conduct "bloodless" (because the US military is "magic" and can do anything, even bend time and space) to create opportunities for Nice White Ladies to push even harder their Nice White Lady moral superiority.

See "the Help." It has nothing for men, no ability to move up by conquest/exploitation (the invaders being smarter/harder working than the conquered). But it has a great deal of moral superiority for Nice White ladies far removed from the ugly reality of killing people (which is what R2P ultimately is all about). Even to save others.

The Nice White ladies are not evil, just clueless, sheltered, removed, and completely unrealistic about how the world works, because they've been sheltered all their lives.

Note that Sophie is just one in a large number of offspring of the coupling of Ashkenazi with blacks.

As you have documented, Ashkenazi have dramatically higher IQ than white Christians, and as such the offspring of Ashkenazi / black couplings have higher IQ than the offspring of White christians with blacks.

For example, when you dig in to the backgrounds of some of the "black rappers" with the highest IQ you find that they often have ashkenazi / black background.

Examples would be the rapper Serengeti (who must be familiar to you since he often raps about Chicago) and the rapper Drake

I love the Tutsis. Pound for pound the most impressive people in sub-Saharan Africa. Yes, including the Afrikaaners. They may even drag poor little Rwanda into the ranks of middle-income countries despite having a dense population and few natural resources, through planning and sheer force of will. Paul Kagame is like a black African Lee Kwan Yew, only better at manipulating Western guilt to keep the UN and NGOs off his back while he does what needs to be done.

Note that Sophie is just one in a large number of offspring of the coupling of Ashkenazi with blacks.

As you have documented, Ashkenazi have dramatically higher IQ than white Christians, and as such the offspring of Ashkenazi / black couplings have higher IQ than the offspring of White christians with blacks.

I've noticed this too. Asian/Black offspring also tend to do better than gentile White/Black mixes, at least from what I saw in college.

What boggles my mind is how the Hutus lost. Rwanda was 85% Hutu and 15% Tutsi before the genocide, and in 3 months, Hutus killed a huge number of Tutsis. Yet, Tutsis from neighboring Burundi--a nation that is 35-40% Hutu--totally kicked Hutu ass in Rwanda, and Hutus ran like a mothaf----.

Hutus sure know how to kill but they don't know to fight.

It kinda reminds me of what happened in Southeast Asia in the late 70s. Khmer Rouge in Cambodia spilled blood like crazy and triggered a war with Vietnam, but the Vietnamese quickly defeated the Cambodians. Even so, Vietnam was a nation of 60-70 million people(and relatively developed) while Cambodia was just a backwaters nation(made worse by Khmer Rouge Maoist policies). I don't see how Burundi could have been all that more formidable or advanced than Rwanda. And given that the Hutus had already killed perhaps the majority of Tutsis in Rwanda, how could they have been defeated so quickly by the Tutsi army from Burundi?

I guess Tutsis were just better organized, more military-oriented, and more disciplined. It's possible Hutus were able to kill so many not out of organization or efficiency but because they all panicked and ran from street to street with machetes and gasoline. But when it came to actually organizing to wage a war and defend their country, they hadn't a clue.

"I gotta say that you found a unique ecological niche where by simply saying fairly obvious things that everyone else won't even mention you become original and insightful."

I think Sailer would be the first one to say he's not trying to come up with the equivalent of E = MC2 in social sciences. Rather, he's trying to show and explain why people who understand E = MC2 in hard sciences reject 2 + 2 = 4 in social sciences. Take Bill Gates. Very smart guy in technology, so he must be CAPABLE of seeing and understanding the truth. Yet, in the social realm, he keeps funding programs where we are to believe 2 + 2 = 5 if we come up p with new ways of adding those figures. So, if 2 ducks + 2 ducks do not add up to 5 ducks, maybe we should try it with frogs. If it still doesn't work, then with guppies. And then with cats. And then with so on and so on. In other words, if teaching reading, writing, and rithmatic to innercity black kids won't work, how about rapping, writhing, and rhythm in new classrooms with fancy computers?

Kagame's invasion didn't come out of Burundi, but out of Uganda, where many Tutsis had fled after democracy arrived in Rwanda in the early 1960s. Kagame had been intelligence boss for the head rebel in Uganda, Museveni, who came to power in 1986. In return, Museveni promised Kagame to subsequently aid the Tutsi reconquest of Rwanda, which began in 1990 and was on the verge of succeeding in 1994 when the Hutu genocide began. (Both Museveni and Kagame are Nilotic. The Hutu are Bantu.)

The obvious analogy for the Rwandan genocide is to how the aristocrats' attack on the French Republic from neighboring aristocratic states in 1792 set off the Great Terror in Paris in 1793.

"'I gotta say that you found a unique ecological niche where by simply saying fairly obvious things that everyone else won't even mention you become original and insightful.' I think Sailer would be the first one to say he's not trying to come up with the equivalent of E = MC2 in social sciences."

Because it should be totally obvious to anyone not blinded by political correctness that the Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda are kind of like the Spanish and Indians in Mexico. How could anyone not notice that?

My understanding is that Tutsi's are predominantly Muslim and Hutu's Christian, which is why so many Hutus were slaughtered in churches.

No, both races are mostly Catholic due to the Belgians converting them. As with Latin America, though, there have been a lot of conversions to Evangelical Protestantism, especially among the Hutu. (Again, like Latin America, where it seems to be mostly the Indians who convert to Protestantism.)

“So, Hollywood Jews blamed on the African genocide on whites. How typical.”

It's the homeopathy theory of white guilt. The further away and more diluted it is, the more power it has! White Europeans are completely responsible for every racial, ethnic, sexual and other conflict on every other planet circling other stars everywhere in the universe!

"My understanding is that Tutsi's are predominantly Muslim and Hutu's Christian, which is why so many Hutus were slaughtered in churches."

It was so many Tutsis slaughtered in churches. One account described a child taking off her shoes and putting them neatly aside before she and the others taking refuge in the church were attacked and murdered. Maybe they took off their shoes when they went in the churches. Maybe some Hutus were slaughtered in reprisals, but I don't think the Tutsis made murderous reprisals on the same scale.Both sides were "Catholic"; at least in name.

In a previous life I made the acquaintance of quite a few Ethiopians and Somalis. Most of the photos of Tutsis I've seen bear a remarkable resemblance to these Northeast Africans. This is easy to check using Google Images.

Clearly there has been some intermarriage, but "arbitrarily-assigned identities" is more nonsense from the Church of Reality Denial.

But, if we wanna accuse the West of exporting 'racism' to the Third World, why not also communism?

We need a hook to tie Communism to the usual suspects. It's challenge, but we're almost there. The key breakthrough is Ditchkin's insight that Communism's atrocities arose from its essentially religious character. With continued perseverance, we can anchor the idea that all left-wing atrocities are due to vestigial Christian influences in these movements.

Perhaps there is something like IQ in the problem.I wonder if there is a difference in IQ between Tutsi and Hutu. I think Tutsi's have higher IQ's , the reason they were choosen by the Belgians to continue to run the country, while under their rule. There must have been IQ test in the colonies as well. Are the results of these test in our eyes "political incorrect"? Nobody ever mentions these aspects. Anyway I think if there is low IQ under a leading class , development is hampered. If Tutsi's are more intelligent they would be the natural leaders. Perhaps the Hutu Tutsi separation is more visible in IQ tests than in anything else. Then the Hutu Tutsi civil war would be a war where low IQ people revolted against there high IQ masters. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations There is a map in this wiki page, where Ghana is markedly more intelligent on average than its neighbours. It is better developed and politically more stable. The same with Uganda.

I copied the following from the Wikipedia about Tutsi's. It shows much better school results for Tutsis's than for Hutu's. So it could support difference in IQ. If the Belgian rulers classified the people according to economic success this is a further indication of IQ difference."During the 1980s, school principals reported that, although secondary school admissions were proportional to the groups within the country and were made by competition within ethnic groups (in accordance with quotas mandated by the Habyarimana government), the students of Tutsi origin (14% of intake) comprised nearly 50% of graduates, on average. This report provoked accusations of tribal favoritism" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutsi

Here's the Google Wallet FAQ. From it: "You will need to have (or sign up for) Google Wallet to send or receive money. If you have ever purchased anything on Google Play, then you most likely already have a Google Wallet. If you do not yet have a Google Wallet, don’t worry, the process is simple: go to wallet.google.com and follow the steps." You probably already have a Google ID and password, which Google Wallet uses, so signing up Wallet is pretty painless.

You can put money into your Google Wallet Balance from your bank account and send it with no service fee.

Google Wallet works from both a website and a smartphone app (Android and iPhone -- the Google Wallet app is currently available only in the U.S., but the Google Wallet website can be used in 160 countries).

Or, once you sign up with Google Wallet, you can simply send money via credit card, bank transfer, or Wallet Balance as an attachment from Google's free Gmail email service. Here'show to do it.

(Non-tax deductible.)

Fourth: if you have a Wells Fargo bank account, you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Wells Fargo SurePay. Just tell WF SurePay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address steveslrATaol.com -- replace the AT with the usual @). (Non-tax deductible.)

Fifth: if you have a Chase bank account (or, theoretically,other bank accounts), you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Chase QuickPay (FAQ). Just tell Chase QuickPay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address (steveslrATaol.com -- replace the AT with the usual @). If Chase asks for the name on my account, it's Steven Sailer with an n at the end of Steven. (Non-tax deductible.)

My Book:

"Steve Sailer gives us the real Barack Obama, who turns out to be very, very different - and much more interesting - than the bland healer/uniter image stitched together out of whole cloth this past six years by Obama's packager, David Axelrod. Making heavy use of Obama's own writings, which he admires for their literary artistry, Sailer gives the deepest insights I have yet seen into Obama's lifelong obsession with 'race and inheritance,' and rounds off his brilliant character portrait with speculations on how Obama's personality might play out in the Presidency." - John Derbyshire Author, "Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics" Click on the image above to buy my book, a reader's guide to the new President's autobiography.